Doug Cutting Explained

Douglass Read Cutting is a software designer, advocate for, and creator of open-source search technology. He founded two technology projects, Lucene and Nutch, with Mike Cafarella. The Apache Software Foundation now manages both projects. Cutting and Cafarella were also co-founders of Apache Hadoop.^[1]

Education and early career

Cutting graduated from Stanford University in 1985 with a bachelor's degree.^{[2] [3]}

Prior to developing Lucene, Cutting held search technology positions at Xerox PARC where he worked on the Scatter/Gather algorithm^{[4] [5]} and on computational stylistics.^[6] He also worked at Excite, where he was one of the chief designers of the search engine, and Apple Inc., where he was the primary author of the V-Twin text search framework.^[7]

Open source projects

Lucene, a search indexer, and Nutch, a spider or crawler, are the two key components of an open-source general search platform that first crawls the Web for content, and then structures it into a searchable index. Cutting's leadership of these two projects extended the concepts and capabilities of general open-source software projects such as Linux and MySQL into the vertical domain of search.^[8] In a 2017 article, Cutting was quoted with the statement, "Open source is a requirement for business."^[9]

Use of MapReduce paradigm

In December 2004, Google Research published a paper on the MapReduce algorithm, which allows very large-scale computations to be trivially parallelized across large clusters of servers. Cutting and Mike Cafarella, realizing the importance of this paper to extending Lucene into the realm of extremely large search problems, created the open-source Hadoop framework. This framework allows applications based on the MapReduce paradigm to be run on large clusters of commodity hardware. Cutting was an employee of Yahoo!, where he led the Hadoop project full-time; he later went on to work for Cloudera.^[10]

Open source foundations and awards

In July 2009, Cutting was elected to the board of directors of the Apache Software Foundation, and in September 2010, he was elected the chairman.^[11]

In 2015, Cutting was awarded the O'Reilly Open Source Award.^[12]

Articles

• Blog post by Tom White about Doug Cutting creating Hadoop Note that this post was written while Hadoop was still an unnamed spinoff of Nutch. Tom updates his earlier post with the Hadoop name here.
• Article co-authored by Doug Cutting in ACM Queue, 'Building Nutch: Open Source Search'

External links

• Web site: Doug Cutting's blog.
• Doug Cutting's publications and patents
• Doug Cutting joins Yahoo!

Notes and References

1. News: The next 10 years of Apache Hadoop. Cutting. Mike Cafarella, Ben Lorica, Doug. 2016-03-31. O'Reilly Media. 2018-04-16. en.
2. News: Doug Cutting—The Father of Search - Code World . 18 May 2022 . www.codetd.com.
3. Web site: Cloudera management team . Cloudera . 2016-08-17.
4. Cutting, Douglass R., David R. Karger, Jan O. Pedersen, and John W. Tukey. "Scatter/gather: A cluster-based approach to browsing large document collections." SIGIR '92 Proceedings of the 15th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval. (Reprinted in ACM SIGIR Forum, vol. 51, no. 2, pp. 148-159. ACM, 2017.)
5. Pedersen, Jan O., David Karger, Douglass R. Cutting, and John W. Tukey. "Scatter-gather: a cluster-based method and apparatus for browsing large document collections." U.S. Patent 5,442,778, issued August 15, 1995.
6. Jussi. Karlgren. Jussi Karlgren. Douglass . Cutting. "Recognizing text genres with simple metrics using discriminant analysis." . Proceedings of the 15th conference on Computational linguistics-Volume 2. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1994.
7. Web site: The Lucene search engine: Powerful, flexible, and free . 15 September 2000 . JavaWorld . 2000-09-15 . 2017-01-25 . Cutting is the primary author of the V-Twin search engine (part of Apple's Copland operating system effort)… .
8. Web site: Wikipedia: Powered by Lucene. Lucene. September 5, 2007 .
9. Web site: Doug Cutting, 'father' of Hadoop, talks about big data tech evolution. ComputerWeekly.com. June 26, 2018 .
10. Web site: Hadoop creator goes to Cloudera . 10 August 2009 . 2011-03-22 . Handy, Alex . Software Development Times . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20120313221400/http://www.sdtimes.com/blog/post/2009/08/10/Hadoop-creator-goes-to-Cloudera.aspx . 13 March 2012 .
11. Web site: Sally . 2010-07-15 . The Apache Software Foundation Announces New Board Members . 2023-05-02 . The Apache Software Foundation Blog . en-US.
12. Web site: O'Reilly Open Source Awards - OSCON 2015. https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211214/5D4kSVcELjM . 2021-12-14 . live. YouTube. O'Reilly. 27 July 2015.